BBA: Cinnamon Raisin(less) Walnut "Swirl" Bread

The Slow & Steady subgroup of the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge took on Peter Reinhart's Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Bread this week. I tell you, the deeper I get into the Bread Baker's Apprentice, the more hooked I get on bread baking. It's like a little miracle happens every time that dough rises.


Of course, there's always something about my breads that keep them from being perfect (see, e.g, tiny ciabatta holes, preternatural hugeness, or gaping holes in cinnamon bread where swirl is supposed to begin) and therefore I don't usually get to revel in the miracle of my risen bread for very long. But still, even less-than-perfect homemade bread is pretty darn good, and this cinnamon walnut bread is Exhibit A.

Many of Peter's breads are two-day breads, requiring some kind of overnight soaker before the dough is mixed, but this one is a one day bread. It's also a one-bowl bread, so it is just about as easy as it gets. I started this one on Sunday evening at about 7:00. I don't usually like to start bread at night because I never know when I'm going to hit The Wall, and if I do happen to hit The Wall when my dough still needs to rise for another 30 minutes and bake for 40 minutes, I'm likely to make decisions that are good for my sleep needs but bad for my bread. Fortunately, on the first rise my dough doubled in 1.5 hours (rather than the 2 that Peter estimates it will take), and crested the pans on the second rise in about an hour. So the bread was out of the oven at the respectable hour of 10:30, and my night-owl husband graciously offered to cover the bread once it was cool. Delicious cinnamon bread and a decent night's sleep to boot - yup, it was a good day.

I left out the raisins here, but decided to try for a cinnamon swirl when shaping the bread. Peter provides clear instructions for doing this, and I tried to follow the instructions exactly, but my swirling clearly needs work. The slices of bread on the end of the loaf had these crazy half swirl things -- kind of like a semicolon with a huge hole where the top dot should be:


I'm a big fan of the semicolon, but not in the middle of my bread. Fortunately, when you got towards the center of the bread, the swirl looked a little more like a swirl is supposed to look (except for the big hole). I gave one loaf to David's parents, and I'm curious to hear how their swirl looked. I'm hoping that it didn't evoke thoughts of punctuation marks for them.


But mutant swirl or not, this is incredibly delicious bread. I was pleased with the crumb, and while I think this would be delicious fresh, cinnamon bread seems like it is meant to be toasted. So I toasted it, buttered it, and sprinkled it with more cinnamon sugar. My entire family loved this. Another great one from the Bread Baker's Apprentice!

BBA: Bagels

It is no exaggeration to say that I was probably more excited to make bagels out of the Bread Baker's Apprentice than I've ever been to make anything ever. More excited that the Cover Cake? More excited than sticky buns? Yes, because I know that somewhere in my town, I can find great chocolate cake and fabulous sticky buns even if I choose to never make them again. But I know that I can't find a truly great water bagel. [NOTE to my local friends: please correct me if there are in fact great bagels to be had here in town. I currently go to Panera when I want a bagel.]

When I think of great bagels, I think of New York style water bagels, like the kind I used to get at H&H Bagels when I lived in New York, or at Bodo's Bagels when I lived in Charlottesville. In fact, I still wear my threadbare Bodo's t-shirt to bed at least three nights a week - that's how devoted I am to the water bagel. Hubs and I ate at Bodo's so much when we were in school that to this day when I walk in there, muscle memory takes over and "my sandwich" (smoked turkey on everything with provolone and lettuce heated) rolls off my tongue as soon as the guy at the counter asks for my order.


So given how much I love water bagels, and how frustrated I've been by my inability to find them locally, I was prepared to do whatever it took to make my own at home. Even if it meant braving an 8 page recipe and mail-ordering specialty flour. You know you've crossed some kind of invisible sanity line when your doorbell rings and you run to the front door singing "it's my high-gluten flour!"

The bagels start out with a sponge made from yeast, high-gluten flour and water. Mix it all together in a bowl and let it sit for a couple of hours until it's foamy and bubbly, doubles in size and "collapses" when the bowl is tapped on the countertop. To me "collapse" is a pretty dramatic word, much more so than "recede," which is what my sponge did. Fortunately, several of us were making the bagels "together" via Twitter, so I got instant reassurance that receding was probably good enough. Once the sponge is ready, add more yeast, more flour, salt, and malt powder.

It became clear pretty quickly that my Kitchen Aid was not going to handle this thick, heavy dough, so I had to knead it by hand. It was my first time hand kneading, I think, and while I don't have anything to compare it to, this seemed like a nice dough to handle. Once it passed the windowpane test and the temperature test, Elizabeth and I began dividing the dough.


Peter Reinhart recommends 4.5 oz bagels, but several people said they were enormous, and having just dealt with huge bread last time, I decided to go with a more manageable 3.5 ounce size. They seemed perfect to me.


After the bagels are shaped, rest for 20 minutes, and pass the "float test," they get refrigerated overnight.

I woke up like a kid on Christmas on bagel baking day. I brought a huge pot of water (with baking soda in it) to a boil and started boiling the bagels, one to two minutes per side:



Then baked them:


The verdict? There is plenty of room for improvement in my bagelmaking. My bagels were on the flat side, and I don't know why. They were also on the outer limits of the acceptably chewy spectrum - I'd probably limit boiling to one minute per side next time to achieve optimal chewiness. But oh. my. gosh. This is it! This is the bagel that I crave but cannot buy here, the bagel that I thought I would only get to experience every 10 years at class reunions. I never in a million years would have thought that I could make these at home. I'm still sort of in shock.

Now, I got the feeling that I liked these more than anyone else who tried them. That could be just because I just like chewy water bagels more than most people, or because I'm so utterly bagel-deprived, or because I sweated these bagels for two days. But in any event, I loved them, and I plan to work these into my baking schedule at least once every couple of months.



Bagels are the third recipe in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice, which a couple of hundred of us are baking through as part of the BBA Challenge. Next up: brioche!

TWD: Kugelhopf

When I went to pick up my daughter from preschool last week, her teacher rushed up to me and said: "Elizabeth sang her very favorite song for us today, and we all really enjoyed it! Elizabeth, do you want to sing your favorite song for your mommy?" I was fully expecting to hear "Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate," since this was what she'd been singing the most at home, complete with wind-blowing sounds and having the wind blow out the lights. So imagine my surprise when instead, I heard her sweet, tiny little voice belt out, in perfect tune:

She wore them apple bottom jeans
Boots with the furrrrr (with the fur!) [yes, she did indeed include the second "with the fur" line]
The whole club was looking at her
She hit the flo'
Next thing you know
Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low . . .

As the teachers threw back their heads and howled, I squirmed and said "Oh! Um. Heh. Heh heh. Gosh, Miss Kelly. I don't know where Elizabeth would have heard Flo Rida and T-Pain. We only listen to Raffi at home. Um. That's something else, alright."

The moral of this story is that kids will soak in absolutely anything, just like my Kugelhopf. But whereas hip hop lyrics and three year olds might be considered "a bad kind of soaking in," we'd all agree that melted butter and warm brioche is most definitely "a good kind of soaking in."




Backing up, I wanted to share what my sweet hubby got me for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. I was pretty excited when I saw the box. What could it be?




(Gasp!) It's a Kugelhopf pan!! How did you know? Thanks, honey!

Well, let me just say that nothing about this project was relaxing. I managed to dodge yeast for my first 12 TWD weeks, so I guess it was just a matter of time before I had to deal with it. When I first read through this recipe, I completely freaked out, started having night terrors and panic attacks by day was a bit nervous. Yeast and I have a long, sordid history. I don't like it and it doesn't like me. We deal with each other by avoiding each other, and that has worked just fine until now.



Is it dissolving? Is the milk warm enough? Is the milk too hot? Am I using the right kind of yeast? Is it still active? Heck if I know.

I forged ahead and added the flour mixture to the yeast mixture. At that point, you basically just let the Kitchen Aid do its thing until the dough "climbs up the dough hook." Like this? Maybe?



This was super stretchy, sticky, gooey dough. The thought of raisins actually mixing into it seemed absurd. I folded them in the best I could:



And then set it in my oven (which was not on) to rise for a couple of hours. There is some serious "waiting around" involved with this kugelhopf. Fortunately,the same day that I made the kugelhopf, some friends talked me into joining this newfangled "Facebook" thing, which is pure crack and possibly the biggest time black hole ever invented. As an enthusiastic Facebook newbie, I was able to pass the time giving my far-flung, long lost friends constant updates on my kugelhopf, which I am sure made them wish that I had stayed lost.

Before:



After:



I decided to call that doubled, and stuck it in the fridge. It was about 11:30 p.m. at that point. I went back to the recipe and realized that I was now supposed to slap the dough every 30 minutes for the next two hours. Quick breads are just not this high maintenance. I decided to split the baby, slap the dough twice, and go to bed at 12:30. If my kugelhopf flopped because of my failure to do the 1 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. smack down, then so be it.

I saw Amanda the next day and told her that I was baking it that night and was seriously worried. She said "you just need to give it a little looooooove before you put it into the pan." See, that's exactly the kind of vague, non-specific instruction that gets me into trouble time and time again. Not knowing what Amanda meant by "loooooove," I gently put it into the pan and said "please rise, baby."

So, so not optimistic:



I stuck it in my oven (which was off) and checked it an hour later. It had not done a thing (yes, I know it's supposed to take 2 or 3 hours, but I was alarmed by the utter sameness of the dough from when I first stuck it in there). Then I remembered that my oven has something called a "proofing" feature, and I dug out the manual to see what that was all about. It said:"The proofing feature maintains a warm environment useful for rising yeast-leavened products." Yes, rising yeast-leavened products, that's my situation. I decided that I might as well make full use all of the technology at my disposal to try to compensate for my lack of talent:



Hallelujah!


It baked up to a lovely golden brown color:



And came out of the pan without any trouble (I take nothing for granted):




I then melted the butter and brushed it on the kugelhopf, and sprinkled it all with sugar. Even though it was once again after midnight, I made David stay up to try some, because Dorie says to eat it right away, and I always listen to Dorie. We both really enjoyed the kugelhopf, but we had a hard time coming up with occasions that would just seem to scream for kugelhopf. We decided that it's not exactly what you want for dessert on your major (or even your minor) holidays -- to us, it seemed more like a breakfast bread than a dessert. And yet, unless you want to wake up in the middle of the night, it won't work as a "good morning, sunshine!" kind of bread, what with the 3 hour rising time that precedes the actual baking. It would be a fine addition to any brunch table (just be sure to make it a late brunch). It would also be lovely at High Tea, for those of you who do that. Or (hypothetically) it might be the perfect midnight snack to cap off another wild Friday night of watching Flight of the Conchords on You Tube. Just as an example.

While this was not my favorite TWD recipe so far, it is definitely the one that I am most proud of. It forced me to face my yeastaphobia head on, and I was richly rewarded with the best remedy for the 12:45 a.m. munchies ever! And I especially enjoyed it a couple of days later when I toasted it under the broiler and spread a little apricot jam on it. So, there you have it, another TWD success! Thank you, Yolanda from All-Purpose Girl, for picking a fun, challenging and tasty recipe!